leisel jones
Leisel Jones
Photo © Dan Mitchell/pullbuoy
In breaststroke circles - men or women - there's only one name that matters at the moment, that of Leisel Jones. The young Queenslander may have had her struggles with both he Australian press and the pressure of the international stage over the past few years, but has now shrugged off those burdens and emerged as a genuinely great swimmer.
Jones burst onto the scene in 2000 when she took two silver medals at the Sydney Olympics almost out of the blue in her first international appearance at just 15 years of age. From that auspicious start she was a regular visitor to the podium at international meets, but, despite taking two individual gold medals in Manchester in 2002, she was unable to claim a title at a global championship.
Those so-called failures at the world championships in 2001 and 2003, when she set a 100m world record in her 100m semi final but couldn't follow that up with a win in the final, and at the Athens Olympics saw her labelled as a choker. Indeed her understandably disappointed reaction to her bronze and silver Olympic medals from Athens also saw her given the tag of a bad loser by the Australian press.
Whether that had any definite effect on Jones is not clear, but certainly a change in coach after the Olympics, when she left long time mentor Ken Wood to team up with Libby Lenton's coach Stephan Widmar most certainly did. Swimming her first major championship since the switch at the World Championships in Montreal, Jones was unfazed by the loss of her 100m world record to American sensation Jessica Hardy at the semif inal stage and duly took her first individual global title. That was swiftly followed by her second as she demolished the world record in the 200m event.
If those wins got the proverbial monkey off her back, then the loss of weight has certainly given Jones added impetus. Shortly after Montreal at the Duel in the Pool she swam within one one-hundredth of a second of the 100m world record and then most recently at the Australian Commonwealth Trials she demolished her own 200m standard by over a second and became the first woman ever under the 66 second barrier in the shorter event to book her place in the Australian team.
Jones herself puts her electric form down to a change in attitude. "It has been an incredible change in the past year." she said after that record swim "I trust in myself and I'm happy with who I am. I literally hated the person I was but changed everything and I love the person I am now."
It will be hard to find a hotter favourite at the Melbourne Games then Leisel who will be almost unbackable in her quest to retain her 2002 medals. The likes of Brooke Hanson, Kate Haywood, Kirsty Balfour and new Australian prospect Sally Foster will most likely be seeing a clean pair of heels with the clock likely to be Jones' biggest rival. With her new found confidence we may even see yet more world standards set by the girl they call 'lethal'.